Friday, May 20, 2016

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Johnna Montgomerie makes the case to treat austerity as a failed experiment. But Laura Basu points out that misleading coverage of economic and fiscal news has led far too many people to see the damage done by austerity as originating from other sources.

- Meanwhile, the Economist examines how unduly strict monetary policy has led to the end of otherwise sustainable periods of economic growth. Chris Savage notes that Republican-governed Michigan is now handing the business sector more free money than it's collecting in corporate taxes. And Deirdre Fulton observes that the U.S.' own assessment shows that the Trans-Pacific Partnership isn't worth pursuing - which hasn't yet resulted in any change in the plans to keep pushing it.

- Selena Ross tells the story of Teta Bayan, the nanny who was prevented from testifying before Parliament about the temporary foreign worker program due to the Libs' preference to hear from the corporate sector first.

- CarbonBrief warns that we're a mere five years away from hitting the upper limit of the greenhouse gas emissions we can send into the atmosphere while suffering only moderate effects. Matt Smith highlights how the oil industry has chosen not to develop its own technologies which could have substantially reduced the damage we're doing to our planet. Nick Fillmore points out the glaring lack of media coverage of climate change compared to its expected consequences. And in a case in point, John Klein posts about the Saskatchewan Party's throne speech climate change denialism which has received no mainstream media attention.

- Finally, Geoff Leo points out how the Saskatchewan Party is playing favourites with access to information requests, charging CBC a hundred thousand dollars more for less Global Transportation Hub documentation than it's prepared to supply to its ideological allies at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.